to get as much yarn spun as possible without starting new projects. i want to have at least 500 yards of finished yarn by the end of june. that means spun, plied, and preferably finished. no new projects can be started until 500 yards have been recorded. one spindle will be kept empty for plying. projects can be rotated through at will.

fiber can be purchased and prepped, but no new projects can be started. yardage will be recorded from memorial day on.

90% worth of the first half of the singles for ridicule. the color isn’t capturing great and i wish i had thought to grab a shot of the fleece before i carded it. the duckish is capturing roughly right. i wish they weren’t so blurry (and these are with the anti-distortion filter on my camera).

duckish

ridicule

i’m not sure why these came out so blurry and if i hadn’t spent 45 minutes fighting with my camera this morning to get them off the disk in the first place i would reshoot them.

clarity

the last of the stuff i dyed for clarity. the only other yarn going into the shawl will be duckish.

clarity

more yarn for clarity- a new skein on the left, one of the original skeins on the right.

clarity fleece

dyed fleece for clarity. some was used as dye soppers, and some was carded into the wool for the base yarn. some was overdyed purple and became duckish.

my spinning has been gifted a new name. i also got upgraded to commerical spinner, as well, without my knowledge sometime in the recent past.

i was sitting at the bus stop today working on ridicule (which has been an insanely fast moving project. i’m almost done with the first half of the singles) when this man came up to me and asked me what i was knitting.

well i wasn’t knitting i told him.

he asked me what i was making.

i told him yarn for a shawl.

he asked me if i meant the thing people wear over their shoulders.

yes, that would be it.

he told me that he wanted to buy one and asked for my contact info.

he then asked me for my business name.

i told him it didn’t have a name.

he told me that i was in luck. he was a photographer (with a camera he refered to as masculine) but his day job was in marketing. he gifted me with a name.

who was withholding the knowledge that knitpicks now carries wheels??? i’m supposed to be pricing roving for my class, not pricing wheels. i do have it narrowed down between halcyon and knitpicks. it may come down to shipping, because halcyon has a wider range of fibers and i can order full pounds without a problem. knitpicks is cheaper but i’m not sure how much shipping for a pound of roving will end up being. i want to snag light fiber for blending for myself as well and i don’t want white which means i want to try out halcyon.

i may end up with orders to both places because knitpicks carries batts too.

anyway. we went and saw the fourth pirates movie yesterday (sunday).

i have to say that i think it’s my favorite of the 4, but it’s also the weakest if that makes sense. it does feel a little flat and a little forced. and depp is showing his age, not that that’s a problem for me at all. but i also thought it had the most interesting storyline of all of them and it was surprisingly original (again with my elves and velocoraptor issue-how many times can you use the same movie monsters before you resort to interjecting random creatures into the storyline?); the siren/mermaid thing was really interesting.

i REALLY like the physical magick they had going on. as in, i could see it actually working like that. it wasn’t overdone and it didn’t feel all that forced. my only issue is that it seemed to be this excalibur type (soul eater style) thing going on; whoever held the focal item was the one that could use it regardless of who they were instead of the focal point being tied to an individual. i guess you can’t win them all and that’s such an insanely small point to get stuck on.

i liked the anne bonny aspect that they had going too. it took me a minute and a run through of my bpal collection in my head (sadly) to realize that a woman on a pirate ship wasn’t all that unheard of. as in, the set up was a little goofy and i wish she was a stronger character but it wasn’t all that far off of a situation that may actually have happened. i liked that they avoided the most obvious set up as well.

it was a dark film by disney standards which i appreciated. there were a few death scenes that were sort of shrugged away. i guess i felt like it was a throwback to the black cauldren and the horned king. there some details that i was actually suprised and pleased to see in there as a folklore/history buff (blackbeard actually did supposedly run around with a braided beard that he had a habit of setting on fire…).

it wasn’t a great film though. depp seemed a little halfhearted through the middle chunk. the movie didn’t really set up location all that well; one minute you were in one place and then you were in the next place with an assumption that you knew what was going on. the main romantic line was actually interesting but it seemed forced and the climax of that thread was slightly more confusing than i think it was intended on being. and ending seemed to suggest a fifth movie which would just be painful. i also didn’t like it in imax. i think i would have been happier with a conventional showing. it was a really pretty movie to look at but i think the imax took away from it.

So. Aphrodite. The goddess of physical beauty and sexual attraction, among other things. She was married to the Greek god of the forge, Hephaestus, except that it was sort of an unbalanced match. She was the perfect woman and he was about as ugly as that pantheon came.

Aphrodite and Ares, the god of war, fell madly in love with each other or at least experienced a deep physical attraction for each other that ended up producing children. For some reason it seems that the past few years have made Ares the under dog here, and people seem to want to have Aphrodite excused for her behavior. This isn’t how i remember the myth going and like it or not Aphrodite was cheating.

Hephaestus however didn’t exactly take this in stride. He got his own. The couple was caught together on several occasions, by Helios the sun god at least once. Hephaestus may not have had physical appearance going for him but he was exceptionally smart and he devised a trap to ensnare the two while they were doing their thing behind his back. thus bringing down the ridicule of the other gods onto the couple.

Again for some reason the way i remember the mythos going and the way that it’s popping up online isn’t matching up. It seems that now people want to frame Aphrodite as being stuck in a loveless marriage with a man that she hates but the way i was initially taught the myth was that she ends up growing quite fond of her husband.

I’m still working on the sunset alpaca for level 1 but i’m really sick of the purple wool i’ve been spinning so i’m moving on to the babydoll that i dyed last week for level two. I’m calling this one Ridicule. i’m going to do a randomish 5 color stripe that i’m going to 2 ply. (pink-red-cider-orangegreen-orangeyellow). and probably overdye orange.

*i haven’t been posting food waste friday entries because i haven’t been cleaning out the fridge. i wish that meant that i had no food waste…no, i just haven’t been cleaning out the fridge. i really need to do that. along with getting all the clothes put away, pick up the living room, clean my kitchen counters and sort out yarn.

i would like to say that i was bad and that i feel guilty. except that i don’t think that i am and i don’t. see that glorious ball of fluff? it’s now mine.

mine mine mine.

i started looking at fibers for my inferno shawl. i really want to be able to get as much spun as fast as possible so i’m buying some fiber with each paycheck, if possible. it’s kettle dyed polworth called phoenix from toplyfiberarts. i was going to get fiber from slimchicken again but i really fell in love with that one, and it was only a couple of dollars more expensive for slightly more fiber.

i was talking about this on cpaag last night, and it turns out the designer of the pattern i want to use is on the group. it also turns out that the pattern is called scrample but that’s neither here nor there. anyway she’s really excited about the thought of this project. i’m getting really pumped up for this.